Advance GNSSRO Data Assimilation and Support Transition(s) to Operations at JCSDA

The Radio Occultation (RO) technique has been proved to provide accurate measurement of atmospheric states by taking advantage of signals broadcast from the Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) already in orbit. Such measurements continue to become available to the Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) community, with comparatively large numbers of new sensors scheduled to be deployed on US government, international, and commercial platforms. The JCSDA is working closely with its partners to verify and validate new sources of GNSSRO observations, transition the latest GNSSRO research to operations (R2O), and quantitatively test the impact of adding these data to operational NWP modeling systems. The goals of this task are to accelerate the use of these new measurements and, eventually, improve operational weather forecasts as well as climatological studies.

To achieve these goals, the JCSDA has formed a project team to accelerate the work for the GNSSRO study and enhance the collaboration with multiple agencies, including NOAA, NESDIS, NAVY, as well as the international communities (e.g., ECMWF). Such an effort is also being aligned with another ongoing JCSDA project, the Joint Effort for Data Assimilation Integration (JEDI). The objective of JEDI is to build a next generation coupled data assimilation system for atmosphere, land, ocean, ice, etc. This paper will present ongoing efforts and work, include construction of a streamline testbed to evaluate GNSSRO data, development of JEDI GNSSRO operators, and improvement of GNSSRO quality assessment and error estimations, etc., as well as future plans for GNSSRO R2O transitions.